The Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit this morning after a 4:55 a.m. EST liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Several minutes into the flight of the Taurus rocket ... the payload fairing failed to separate.

It appears that the satellite didn't achieve any kind of useful trajectory, with NASA describing the mission as "ended".

The two-year OCO plan would have seen the satellite's new spectrometers map atmospheric carbon around the globe to unprecedented levels of accuracy. It was thought that results from the OCO would remove much of the uncertainty and acrimony from the current debate on CO2. ®